ROBERT J. BRYM and BADER ARAJ contest Mia Bloom's out-bidding thesis, which holds that suicide attacks are a currency for outbidding rivals in the competition for popular support. They find that public opinion data are inconsistent with the outbidding thesis and argue that support for suicide bombing is more a function of social solidarity than competition within the Palestinian community.
How do dominant parties win in hybrid political regimes, that is, authoritarian regimes that permit significant political competition? Why do they ever lose? Mexico and Taiwan had, and Singapore and Malaysia still do, long-lived and comparatively low-repression political systems featuring elections free enough that opposition parties form and seriously contest the incumbents.
This book focuses its thoughtful, deeply researched coverage on a momentous half decade, the years 1941 – 1946, encompassing the transition out of World War II, through Bretton Woods and planning of a new international economic order, the conceiving and founding of the United Nations (UN), and the Nuremburg Charter and trials as an attempt at transitional justice which would affirm principles of humanitarian law, even before the UN's passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on 10 December 1948.
How does the ideology under girding national policy reform trickle down to state and local-level policy and front line service delivery? What are the ripple effects of such changes for other institutions and for population outcomes? This book assesses trends in welfare reform and workforce training and effects for single mothers. The authors trace the prominence and causal role of the idea of “work first” at multiple levels and institutional settings. They find it has become the singular operating rationale for welfare recipients and low income adults more generally across the United States since the late 1990s. They further argue that it has shut doors to higher education.
It was considered strange and a bit odd when many conservatives in Congress joined liberals to enact the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which most political observers argued represented an unprecedented role for the federal government in education policy. By tradition, conservatives had been more likely to prefer state, local, and private initiatives to federal laws and regulations; liberals, on the other hand, favor the federal government offering solutions to help meet needs that states and school systems are unable to meet themselves. Lee Anderson traces the evolution of federal involvement in education as a function of the narrowing ideological positions of liberals and conservatives. While conventional wisdom holds that NCLB represents a marked departure from previous federal policies, Anderson's position is that NCLB was more of an outgrowth of (rather than as a radical departure from) previous federal education policies.
An interesting article appeared in the paper the other day. It concerned a report from the former American overseer of Iraq's prisons. The official, Don Bordenkircher, claimed that during his time there several prisoners had “boasted of being involved in the transport of WMD warheads to Syria.”
Here in Washington, the “silly season” is well and truly upon us. Observing the frenetic campaign cycle, with its endless media appearances, speeches and jostling for political position, it's easy to understand why conventional wisdom has it that no serious policy gets done in an election year. And yet, foreign policy remains front and center on the national agenda. As of this writing, at least one crisis, the conflict between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, has broken into the open, while another—that of Iran's nuclear ambitions—waits in the wings.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Human Rights, and Islam
Political Geography:
Russia, Iran, Washington, Georgia, and South Ossetia
Is Turkey turning away from the United States? On the surface, it certainly looks that way. The number of Turks with a positive view of the U.S. has dropped steadily, from 52 percent in 2000, to 30 percent in 2002, to only 13 percent as of June 2008, according to the most recent Pew poll. Seventy percent of Turks consider the U.S. an “enemy.” These numbers are particularly dismal compared to those of other countries polled: only 60 percent of Pakistanis, 39 percent of Egyptians, and 34 percent of Russians and Chinese hold the same views.
Over the last few months, Israel and Syria—through Turkish mediation—have resumed some sort of peace talks. Despite the volume and frequency of these overtures at the moment, this round of “peacemaking” will not break precedent; meaningful progress is highly unlikely. Instead, it fits a pattern of previous such efforts—overtures which led nowhere or even ended in the opposite, namely escalation (as in 1995-1996 and 1998-1999). Neither the Israeli nor the Syrian government is currently positioned to enter real peace talks. But each, for its own reasons, has a great momentary interest in talking about talks with great vigor.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's July 30, 2008, announcement of his intention to resign from office and the recent upsurge in internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah operatives in Gaza has thrown a monkey wrench in the Bush administration's goal of seeing Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority sign a peace treaty laying out the borders and powers of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008. But even in the unlikely event that such an agreement is reached, far from stabilizing Israel's relationship with the Palestinians, it will likely have either no impact on the Palestinian conflict with Israel, or a profoundly negative one.